Captive of Kadar

Lucky.

It was an odd word for a man who had lost everything and nearly his own life to boot.

She leaned over and tenderly kissed his shoulder at the place where skin met scar. For a moment he stiffened, and then she felt him relax under her lips.

‘Does it still hurt?’

‘It pulls.’

And that would hurt. Probably nothing compared to the pain he’d endured through his years of operations, but no doubt more than what most people could bear.

She pressed her lips softly to his skin again, thinking about the damage that could be done when things went wrong and about the people she’d met today, the families and the workers who adored their boss, and shook her head on a sigh.

‘What?’ he said, rolling back onto his side, lifting her chin with his hand.

‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘After all that happened to you, how can you even stand the thought of fireworks? And yet you manufacture them. You employ half the valley. What if the same thing happened here?’

‘You think I would let that happen to these people? Of course, it can be a dangerous business. But it can also be done safely. There are no children in my factory. No babies. No stockpiles to explode if an accident did happen.’

He curled his hand around her neck, his fingers lacing into her hair, his gaze drinking her slowly in from her toes to her head, making her scalp tingle and setting her senses alight.

But it was the look in his eyes that triggered the flame deep down inside her, once again triggering her need. Dark eyes that burned with their own smouldering heat.

‘Don’t you see, who better to run a fireworks factory than a man who understands what is at stake if something goes wrong?’

He brushed her hard nipples with the backs of his fingers, turning her skin of her breasts goosebumped as he pulled her head towards his, and she sensed this was madness and could do nothing to stop it.

Who better? she asked herself as he pulled her against his hot mouth.

There was no better.

There was only Kadar.

* * *

He lay there under the soft glow from the pinpricks of light from the constellation of stars above the bed, listening to her even breathing, her head on his shoulder, her hair spilled like a river of gold across her pillow, her pale skin pearlescent.

Who was she, this woman who had stumbled into his life and wedged herself in so tight? Who was she, that he would spill the details of his life to her? Details that nobody but his closest friends knew—Zoltan and Bahir and Rashid, his friends from university, and Mehmet, of course, who’d been there and witnessed it all firsthand.

He never thought about children, not having his own, and yet he’d looked at this woman with a child on her lap and he’d seen the woman she would be with her own child—a dark-haired child that he had put in its mother’s belly.

Where had that come from?

And why did a few days suddenly seem too short, when he was used to a woman lasting no more than a few hours? Why did the thought of putting her on plane back to her home country make his breath stall and his chest tighten?

He wanted her gone.

He wanted his life back.

He’d wanted those things all along.

And yet...

He looked at her sleeping. A sultan would be proud to have her in his harem. As his favourite.

Why shouldn’t he?

No. A sultan wanted progeny. A sultan needed to have a son or preferably a host of sons so that the bloodline could continue.

A sultan needed family.

Kadar didn’t.

A family was the last thing he wanted.

Because if you didn’t have family, then you couldn’t lose them.

He eased her head away and she sighed in her sleep and rolled over, her breathing settling back into regular, while he punched his pillow and cursed the sleep that was proving elusive.

Madness.

Because he wasn’t a sultan and he didn’t have favourites and he wanted his life back the way it was and nights without a headful of questions.

There was no question about it, no question at all.

It would be better once she was gone.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

AMBER LOVED HER DAYS in the Burguk Valley. When he wasn’t needed for meetings with officials or at the factory, Kadar took her sightseeing, showing her the highlights of the wide weather-scoured basin. He took her to other cliffs where in past ages the shepherds had taken shelter and made their homes in the rock as they once had before the Pavilion of the Moon had been carved out the same for a Sultan’s retreat. They walked trails along ancient trade routes that took them past centuries-old rock churches, still with frescos of rich reds and golds on the walls and ceilings, and Roman rock tombs and aqueducts.